Paul Reilly

Paul Reilly, partner at New Direction Partners, has been in the industry for over 30 years and for the last eight years has been providing investment banking and financial advisory services for privately held and family-owned businesses. He brings supplier experience as a senior executive at Polychrome, now part of Kodak, a worldwide supplier of printing and packaging supplies. He also brings extensive acquisition experience as CEO of Cenveo, one of the industry most active acquirers.

Congratulations — having carefully planned and executed the acquisition of a printing company to complement the one you already own, you’re finally prepared to sit down with the seller to close the deal. Naturally, you’re feeling good about what you’ve accomplished and what the future holds for the merged entity that your effort has created. This is the point at which we always urge our buying clients to pause.

If you’ve been clocking mergers and acquisitions in the printing industry this year, you’ve had plenty to keep you busy. The fast pace of transactions in 2016 tells us that the market is sound and that many looking for opportunities to buy or sell have had little difficulty in locating them.

Who would have thought that we'd ever be talking about negative interest rates? Now we have to, because in many places, they’ve become a fact of life. While the likelihood of negative rates in the U.S. seems small, the Federal Reserve has said it doesn’t rule out using them for emergency stimulus in an economic crisis.

As an investment banker to the printing and packaging industries, New Direction Partners has participated in scores of such transactions. While no two mergers were exactly alike, all of them followed a five-part sequence of events that we recommend as a model to all of our clients seeking to merge with other companies.

There are plenty of good things to say about pride. After all, it’s one of the noble impulses that gets us out of bed in the morning and motivates us to do the best job we can for our customers, employees, and others who depend on us. But when it makes anyone resist the idea that today, every print company owner should be preparing either to acquire or to be acquired, it becomes something else. Steer clear of the trap it can set for your business when your moment of truth arrives.

In these unprecedented and uncertain times, PRINTING United Alliance, PIA Affiliates, and NAPCO Media are committed to providing the printing and visual communications industries with the most up-to-date resources on the ongoing COVID-19 situation. The staff is here to help you as we all weather this storm together.